


The Dioskouroi

by Mithrigil



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology
Genre: Alien Biology, Balancing Act, Futuristic Retelling, IN SPACE!, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-24
Updated: 2011-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-27 23:46:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/301409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mithrigil/pseuds/Mithrigil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>My brother and I were born under different stars. I used to think this was just Mother’s euphemistic way of explaining that we bled different colors and slept different hours and were good at different things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dioskouroi

**Author's Note:**

  * For [twincy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/twincy/gifts).



Mother used to say that my brother and I were born from an egg. My brother was the kind of kid who stopped eating eggs after he heard that, even if he knew they came from chickens or clones. Mother laughed at him out the corner of her mouth for almost a month. Castor would say, completely seriously, that he didn’t want to eat our new baby brother-or-sister.

I think he knew Mother was pregnant again before she did.

I remember she apologized to Castor by buying him his very first hoverbike, a whole year before I got mine and two years before he could legally drive it. I didn’t mind, though. Castor wouldn’t get caught, and I was never as good at riding. Even after I learned I only got on that bike to lose races to him.

**

My brother and I were born under different stars. I used to think this was just Mother’s euphemistic way of explaining that we bled different colors and slept different hours and were good at different things. When I grew up, I learned how literally she meant it, but she was probably right not to explain it to us. After all, if you go through fifteen years saying we’re brothers, we’re brothers, stop staring at us in the kinema or the complex and looking at mother like she’s some kind of freak, you _stay brothers_ no matter what you look like. And I never questioned it, because I knew how much we both looked like Mother. I sometimes wonder if it would have been the same if my father hadn’t been humanoid at the time, but there’s no point wondering. He is what he is and I am what I am.

Castor bleeds mostly-red as long as we’re in a place with enough oxygen. He has a lithe thin body and ten fingers, ten toes, and dark skin all over except for the palms of his hands. I bleed mostly-whitish-gold no matter where we are, have ten fingers but only eight toes, and I’m not as dark as he and mother. But once when we were eleven, in art class at school, I took an old-fashioned photograph, the kind that’s only two-dimensional, and toggled with the settings so that we were the same color, somewhere in between. It didn’t make us look any more like brothers to me, since I knew, but the teacher said she understood what I was trying to do and shared it with the whole class. Castor said it was embarrassing. And it didn’t work, but it didn’t matter.

* *

Our father, as opposed to _my_ father, was our city-state’s representative in the Andromeda Council. He wasn’t that when we were born--he just ran a shipping fleet--but he ran twice, once when Castor and I were twelve and again when we were fourteen, and the second time it worked. Twelve isn’t too young to see the trikameras on you, and it’s definitely not too young to stop the reporters from asking feed-selling questions.

They said our living room was too crowded for the trikameras so they sat us in the yard instead, arranged like a portrait in our best suits, with Helen and Cly in their best dresses, and Mother and Father holding on to our shoulders when they weren’t talking with their hands. They asked my father questions about his trade policies and what he would do if elected and things I mostly understood, and asked mother about her dancing and her time on Olympus. She didn’t seem to love talking about it, but she smiled like her teeth had been greased.

“We’re all for favorable relations with the Olympians,” my father said, like he was trying to steer the eyes of the cameras back toward him. “It’s by their sufferance we came here, and even if we could sustain ourselves on our own, their cooperation would make it easier for us, the same way ours makes it easier for them.”

The next thing the anchorperson said felt like it was more than halfway meant for me, which is probably why I remember it as acutely as I do.

“And we all know how much you’ve cooperated with the Olympians,” the reporter said. I was, after all, proof.

Mother never cried on trikamera, when she wasn’t dancing. She always waited until she knew they were gone.

*   *

Castor was afraid of heights. Helen and I are the only ones who knew. We had bunk-beds for fifteen years, and he always took the bottom. His voice always drifted up at me, and I always hung over the edge to catch it.

“Which one of us is the one with the different father?” he asked me, not that night but one night that week, long after he should have been asleep and I should have been pretending.

“I’m pretty sure it’s me,” I said. “Father’s like you.”

“No he isn’t,” Castor said. “He’s smart.”

“I meant his body.”

“His body’s not like mine either. He’s big across the shoulders and his eyes are black.”

“Mother’s eyes are your color.”

“I’m the different one, Pollux. Not you. If anyone’s different it’s me, okay? You belong here and that’s that.”

I couldn’t see him from where I was, just the amorphous lump under blankets I never had to use. He’d turned his face into the pillow and hidden himself almost completely away in the dark.

I probably should have gone down to him that night instead of waiting for the night I eventually did. It might have made him happier. But I knew he was wrong, so I just said nothing, and waited in bed for the suns to come up.

*      *

The second time our father ran for election, as I said, it worked. Now that I’m older I know he was right about why, and there were some complex interplanetary issues that made his stance on Olympus more prudent, and besides, Troia, but at the time I thought it was because they didn’t interview the family. Mother took the four of us on tour with her for the entire month before the election, and when we came back, father was a Senator.

“Gods, you’ve grown,” he said to me.

“We were closer to the suns on Kreta,” my mother explained.

That night, I stood next to Castor in front of a mirror. I was taller than him by a hand already, and that distance would never shrink, no matter how much he tried to catch up.

*        *

I grew tall and broad, and Castor just grew tall. By the time we were sixteen, I was boxing middleweight, and Castor was racing laps around Sparta, turning his tricked-out bike on coin-thin turns that scared the life out of me, playing chicken with the soldiers in their APCs. Sometimes they crashed. He only did once, the way that cost him that bike and maybe one scar but nothing else of his. I was always taller than he, always paler, even the scars.

I remember after one race, Jason Herakoi, who was still a captain back then, climbed out of his dented APC and laughed his golden head off, and tackled my brother off his bike like he was the only thing that could have made him obey the law of gravity. I remember I watched them tussle, their protective gear shining in the light of the bike and what was left of the suns. I remember how they looked, how they sounded, and in hindsight I probably shouldn’t have charged down there and punched Jason in the face.

I broke his nose. He bled red like Castor.

I was jealous.

*           *

I met my father, not our father, the summer Castor and I turned seventeen. Helen and Cly were almost twelve, and you’d think they would be harder to keep apart than Castor and I, but Castor’s the one who pitched a fit about it and I couldn’t help but agree with him.

“Macedonia is dangerous,” our father (not my father) said.

“They why send Helen?”

“Because she has to go, and Pollux can take care of her.”

“Yeah,” Castor said, “and who’ll take care of him? That’s my job.”

“Pollux can take care of himself.”

I disagreed, but not aloud. I still disagree.

Our father said, “You’re coming with me to the garrison this week.”

“Like hell,” Castor said, which started another fight entirely, but that didn’t stop me and Helen from going to Macedonia with Mother. It was the first, and almost the only, time that Castor and I had been apart.

*              *

I would say the Olympians aren’t like us, but I’m like them, so it’s wrong. What I mean to say is that the Olympians aren’t like the citizens, which is truer, and still true even as it applies to me.

My father, Zeus, is a nuclear converter. That’s not his job; that’s what he is. He takes whatever form he likes when he’s dealing with the citizens, but the fact remains that he feeds on light and gives off the energy that powers this entire solar system. He could decide not to help us at any time. That’s why my mother didn’t say no.

It’s a hard thing to find out when you’re sixteen. It’d be a hard thing to find out anytime, but I honestly think sixteen’s worse.

When my father offered his hand for me to shake, and complimented me, called me strong and said I was his spitting image and asked to test my grip, like a doctor does to a baby, I panicked. His skin didn’t burn me, but a static charge rippled through my shoulders and down my spine, and Zeus just laughed like it was some kind of prank.

He said that Helen was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen and that I would surely make him proud. He asked me about school, and boxing, and the army. He didn’t mention Castor or Cly at all.

Helen decided to stay with him for a little while. I declined.

*                   *

When I came home, I was another three inches taller than Castor. I know because when I lay down with him in his bed, our hips didn’t align, and we had to keep them moving if we wanted to touch.

His heart beat much faster than mine. His pulse raced like he did. So did his hands.

I didn’t sleep in my own bed that night, or any other night after that.

*                        *

On Sparta, military service is compulsory. When Castor and I turned eighteen, we joined, and when Jason Herakoi deserted, we deserted with him. Our father was furious (not in the least because it meant he didn’t get re-elected), and our mother was terrified, but I know that if I didn’t go with Castor, I’d never forgive myself.

Jason was never a good influence. Hell, Jason was never a good _person_ in the strictest sense of the word. If he couldn’t fight it, fuck it, or overclock it, Jason wanted nothing to do with it. But he loved Castor, so I put up with him, and he was one of the only people in my brother’s circle who never looked at me as an outsider. I later, much later, found out that Jason was like me, and he knew, and his full-citizen twin had been killed when they were just children.

It’s probably a testimony to Jason’s charisma that I can look back on the Argo and be completely unrepentant. I mean, it’s _legendary_ , that ship, and we’re legendary with it, even as two lesser names on a criminal record.

It’s also a really good thing that the Spartan military will take you back after you desert. At this point, they almost expect it, and besides, when we came back, the army needed all the men it could get.

*                              *

Idas and Lynceus were natural brothers, with the same father and mother, and it showed. Their father, Leucippus, had beaten our father in the last election, and oh, did Idas want us to know it. (Lynceus, for his part, didn’t have a thought of his own in his head.) Idas was almost as big as I was, and that’s without any Olympian influence, but he knew how to throw his weight around--literally, when he drove his machines around the cities, and right past our windows, the engines humming sharp enough to melt glass. Castor would seethe. I’d hold him down in bed. Sometimes it helped.

I’ll admit we didn’t make the best case for ourselves, what with the Argo and serving our tour. But Idas didn’t have to follow us all the way to Arcadia just to gloat, and he didn’t have to rig his hoverbike with twin engines like Castor’s, and he _really_ didn’t have to deface our barracks with graffiti made out of manure.

But calling me a lightsucker where Castor could hear? That was just plain stupid.

It really did unfold like in the kinema, _you, me, dawn, we ride until we can’t,_ and this time I didn’t try to stop him.

Then Idas named the place, the Mainalon, and I wished to the gods that I’d said something.

*                                   *

“He’s trying to kill you,” I said.

Castor shrugged. “Let him try. He won’t.”

“You don’t know that mountain,” I said. “He does. He’ll _use_ it.”

“It still won’t work.”

“You don’t know that either.”

“Maybe I do,” he said. “Maybe I know things. Maybe I know more than I should, the way you shine more than you should. Maybe I got something from my father that you didn’t get from yours.”

“He’s a citizen.”

“How can you tell? What if he’s not? What if Mother slept with another something-else like yours and what if me and Cly aren’t Tyndareus’s at all? What if I really am just as special as you? Then Idas’ll choke on dirt tomorrow no matter what he thinks he’s got in store for me.”

They were confident words. They were fighting words. But I was stretched out alongside him, naked and near enough to feel his pulse, and it was as fast as a rabbit’s or a rat’s, like his heart was backed into a corner.

I wondered, then, if Castor was still afraid of heights. I still don’t know.

*                                           *

They didn’t take seconds, but me and Lynceus might as well have been hostages, trapped on the spot. The suns crept over the mountains and Castor and Idas raced in and out of shadows, skirting clifftops and shedding stone down the edges. They moved too fast to follow with sights or tracers, so all I could to was watch the glow of their bikes weave in and out of the crags from half a mile away, and soon enough the suns were too bright for me to see the glow. They moved at breakneck speed, around and around the mountain, and wound back to us, side by side, the suns at their backs and no sign of stopping.

It only became clear that Idas was charging straight for me when I saw his helmet glint like a mad, gleaming smile. I think Castor knew about half a second before.

That close, the engine of a hoverbike doesn’t sound like a hum; it’s more like the sound a drill makes receding from the hole it’s just carved. I felt it more than heard it, and the lightfield of Castor’s bike, not Idas’s, clipped my shoulder when they collided. The bikes tumbled through the air, hurtled to the stone, and exploded.

Castor didn’t bleed at all. He immolated.

*                                                 *

When Lynceus came at me, blaming me for what happened of his brother, I beat him to death. It was as simple as that. He bled red, and I didn’t care, and I kept hitting him after he was dead, until my fists made it past his bones to the rotten red earth.

Dawn turned to morning, and the suns blared down on me, caked the blood and dirt and ashes onto my skin. When it glinted off the wreckage of the bikes, I tore through that instead of Lynceus, ripped apart the engines and the hulls for any part of Castor I could touch. His protective gear had melted onto the remains of his skin, the burnt black and the charred fabric indistinguishable. His face was an unrecognizable wreck beneath the mask of his helmet.

The suns burned into my shoulders and out through my eyes and hands. I felt the same awful frisson that I’d coursed when my father touched me, and I heard his laughter.

I let it burn me too. I held Castor against me, and I let everything around us burn.

*                                                       *

We look more similar now, Castor and I. He’s still darker, but I don’t shine as much. He’s still shorter, but he’s almost as broad as I am now, from weeks of physical therapy and the habits that gave him, and besides, I’m not as strong as I was. I still only have eight toes, but he only has eight of his fingers, so things have evened out. He doesn’t need all of them to ride, and he can ride again, and that’s what matters.

We both live longer than we should. We both feed on the suns. He doesn’t sleep as much as he used to, and I sleep more. And someday, we will die, but we will die together.

The next time I went to see my father, I told him what happened. He said it lessened me, made me less Olympian.

I asked if that meant, if I was less, if Castor was more.

**


End file.
